Thursday, 4 August 2016

imbroglio notes 7 - black sword black sword

My relationship to game violence is pretty weird, I dunno, I'll say I want us to do better and represent other parts of life but then when I turn around and actually make a game it's just like kill 1000 things. Like I'm not getting excited about super detailed gore but even at the level of symbolic representation, it's weird to spend all this time on murder simulation. I think there's a good argument to make that it serves some positive role in terms of venting violent impulses but it's not clear that it doesn't actually nurture violent impulses instead? Like probably intense physical exercise is probably a better way to vent really. Also I don't feel like I have a whole lot of repressed violence that I need to get out, maybe that's only because I already healthily release it through simulation or exercise but it's not really feasible to stop those and see if something bad builds up. But yeah I tend to think of myself as pretty pacifistic. Although on the other hand if you threaten someone close to me it turns out I will instinctively use force to stop you, I think that's pretty normal? Anyway I think it comes up in games pretty naturally, you have some kind of challenge, it's simplest to frame that as a conflict, it's simplest to frame that as violence. Pieces are being eliminated? Call them dead. Really hard to break out of this pattern when trying to do elegant design.

Anyway yeah I actually really enjoy some pretty generic fantasy settings and for a while I've meant to get around to making an RPG-type game with more like that kind of context, I actually started making lots of games with orcs and swords and it feels like mostly coincidence that those weren't the ones I ended up finishing. Imbroglio really seemed to make sense for that kind of setting, it simplifies some of the rule explanations. But it's a setting where the violence is more explicit, you can't hide behind debugging weird computer glitches or whatever. So I felt a bit unsure about that. Also the RPG mechanic of leveling up by killing things is basically messed up, it directly encourages optimising the number of things you kill, even going out of your way to kill things that you otherwise wouldn't. Even if I'm okay with violence for a nice reason, this doesn't correspond to anything you could have a hope of justifying. Something I was pretty pleased with in Zaga-33 is how the rules strongly discourage getting into fights; you have to kill some aliens because they're obstacles to your progress, but every fight costs you limited resources so the optimal way to play is to minimise the number of kills even if that means going quite far out of your way; just with the game rules it makes a clear statement that violence is sometimes necessary but is best avoided where possible (which really confused some players who just went through blindly clearing every level and then wondering why they couldn't survive past the third). But Imbroglio forces you to kill everything that comes your way, and to think about maximising the value you get out of each kill, wtf.

So I thought okay this game is pretty dark, the hero is not only put in a context where their survival is dependent on ending hundreds of other lives, they're explicitly using those deaths as a resource. Maybe I can play up that darkness, make it clear in the game's context? Make it feel really awful that you're forced to kill or be killed, frame rpg leveling/grinding as a dark compulsion. Thought about Michael Moorcock's Elric stories as a reference, with his demon sword that drinks the souls of anyone it cuts. Vampiric weapons that grow more powerful as they're bathed in innocent blood. A tragic, haunted hero driven by a curse he cannot control, trying to do good but ultimately dooming all he loves. A power that demands a price, helping defeat your enemies but betraying you at the last moment to take the life of your dearest friend.

Those are the ideas I had going into it, but then I made it and it's not exactly what came out! I think there's an edge there of that darkness but overall it's a lot lighter than I'd envisaged, which is probably for the best since I've had to live with it. I could have probably done more with words to make it hurt but I find it dangerous to use many words in a game, people will skim past them and miss essential rules; Imbroglio already had a lot of rule words.

This ties into the graphical style. The main constraint there was functionality. I went for a high resolution style because there needed to be a bunch of text you could read, and identifiable tiles that display information about experience, damage, abilities and are still visible enough when there's something standing on top of them. Thinking about inspirations from 70s and 80s pulp fantasy novels and RPG settings I was trying to get towards the styles of illustrations in those, people like Erol Otus, background the colour of the pages of an old second-hand book (not representative of their original vision but of my relationship to it). But with all the layers of game it didn't work to fit everything into this style, ended up doing the characters more solid and bright to stand out on top of the book-sketch background tiles; functional, contributes to it feeling less dark.